Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 6th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I have in this group an amendment that was recommended by the Complex Life and Death Decisions group at King’s and which builds on the clause that was proposed in the other place by the MP for Bradford West and accepted, currently Clause 2(2). It seems that Amendment 87 before us would knock that out, but it has an amendment to it that has been clearly explained by the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley.

This seems to be the start of an improvement that is very necessary, but it does not do everything. There is a concern that those with other types of eating disorder can be missed out or slip through the net, particularly those with bulimia and those who go on completely bizarre diets and end up with severe malnutritional states. I have known two examples directly: one person believed that he could live only on cottage cheese, and another was eating kilogrammes of parsnips every day in the belief that that would cure her disease, and ended up with quite severe metabolic disturbances.

The problem with the amendments so far is that they fail to exclude the voluntary stopping of eating and drinking that is designed deliberately to make you terminally ill. I mention, if I may, the problem of T1DE—that is, a type I diabetic with an eating disorder. Lesley and Neal lost their young daughter Megan at Dignitas, after years of inadequate treatment. I have permission to quote them. They said:

“Following inadequate and inappropriate in-patient and community treatment for T1DE, our daughter chose to take her own life after asking for a Dignitas referral from her care team. She clearly would have taken up the assisted dying option if available to her, however, just before she committed suicide she said ‘I don’t really want to die, I just can’t do this any more’”.


That illustrates the real difficulty for young people with disorders that are on the boundary here. I hope that we can build on these amendments on Report to make sure that they really are watertight.

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 89, 91, 92, 101 and 103. Surely we need to demonstrate that what we term safeguards in the Bill against voluntarily becoming terminally ill are adequate and do not allow for voluntary acts to accelerate the timeline or even to create eligibility for assisted suicide. There seems to be a lack of clarity between terminal illness and eating disorders or voluntary action, which could undermine the very structure of the Bill itself.

Does the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, in his Amendment 87, not row back on Kim Leadbeater’s previous amendment in the Commons? It seems that this amendment is significantly narrower. Can a suicidal person, dependent upon insulin or dialysis to remain alive, refuse that treatment and become eligible under the Bill? However, if he believes that cases of voluntarily withdrawing life-sustaining treatment such as insulin to voluntarily induce a terminal illness should not be eligible under the Bill, why does he oppose amendments that would close that loophole?